Events

Fuller Award: Ed Roberson

Thursday, June 18, 2026
6 p.m.

The Poetry Foundation
61 W. Superior Street
Chicago, IL 60654

Poet Ed Roberson received the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame’s Fuller Award for his lifetime achievements as a writer. He is the 19th Chicago author given the CLHOF’s highest honor, at a ceremony at and in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. Speakers, including CM Burroughs, Peter O’Leary, Saretta Morgan, julie patton, Lena Roberson, and Chicago Poet Laureate avery r. young, gave context to Roberson’s significant contributions here and around the country. The ceremony took place on Thursday, June 18. In addition to the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame and Poetry Foundation, partners for the ceremony include the American Writers Museum, Chicago Poetry Center, Columbia College Chicago, Guild Literary Complex, Northwestern University, and University of Chicago.

A native of Pittsburgh, Roberson has spent more than two decades in Chicago, teaching at Northwestern University, Columbia College, and the University of Chicago. Since 1970, when he published his debut collection, When Thy King is a Boy, Roberson has been among America’s most innovative, important, and decorated poets. His 13 poetry collections resonate with influences spiritual, musical, and visual. In the title poem of his 2022 collection, asked what has changed, the narrator stares out of his Chicago apartment window as a start to a muse on the natural world and our relationship to it. Roberson’s poems sometimes criticize as well as question, and in his work he’s been a force for societal change. An examination of race, including in his use of language, permeates much of his work. Among his many awards, Roberson has won the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award (2008); the Penn/Voelcker Prize for Poetry (2016); the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Poety Prize (2016); an Academy of American Poets Fellowship (2017); and Poets & Writers’s Jackson Poetry Prize (2020). The event, as always, was free and open to the public.